Verified Services

Heroic Ads – New Bravia

I can’t help myself.

I’ve been contacted by the online PR guys who are ‘seeding’ the new Bravia ad. Part of me wants to not play ball, but the other part of me wants to see what’s going on. I do like the ads and I’m interested to see what next…

I got contacted by their PR guys with this:

Set to follow in the footsteps of its predecessors (“balls” and “paint”) the new ad is a closely guarded secret, but I can tell you that it is currently being shot in New York; ‘Gorgeous’ director, Frank Budgen, will be directing; and this time the theme is ‘play-doh’.

Ruth Speakman from Sony will be ‘Twittering’ throughout the filming of the advert, providing early glimpses as the shoot unfolds. Ruth’s experiences live on set can be found at: http://twitter.com/braviaplaydoh.

It’s definitely shaping up to be another ‘hero’ ad. All eyes on the ad. The advert being the thing that we’re all waiting for. And suckers like me are doing the bidding of Lord Advert. They’ve even got people ‘twittering’ (their inverted commas not mine) about the making of the ad. I wonder if there’s a Facebook group called ‘waiting for the new Bravia advert’?

But the thing is, there’s only a few adverts out there that can actually sustain or command this kind of attention. And to be honest if this one’s more ‘paint’ than ‘balls’ I think it could be their last opportunity to ride on the goodwill created by beautiful bouncing balls.

It’s not an uncommon thing for many of us to get a brief that’s basically “make this ad famous”. Sometimes it works; if the ad deserves to be famous. Oftentimes it fails; because it doesn’t. It’s not that tricky a formula to work out. It is tricky to tell someone (or admit to yourself) that yours is one of the latter.

An ad that tried to hero-ise itself without the balls to back it up (‘scuse the pun) is the recent Ford one with the balloons in it. This one if you’ve not seen it:

The first time I saw it was in the Metro, they’d run a piece on how it was going to be shown during some football match, and it had cost loads of money, and it had lots of landmarks in it. OK, so what, now you’re going to have to prove something to me.

The second time I saw it was in Victoria station. Where they’d parked a Ford Mondeo in the station with loads of plasma screens, a sound system, etc. And you know what you could do? You could sit in the car AND WATCH THE ADVERT! I thought this was pretty lame and a bit navel-gazingly-rubbish. That was until I visited Amsterdam a few weeks ago and it was eclipsed by this (at the airport):

As you’re going along the travelator, the ADVERT FOLLOWS YOU!

It’s just like Minority Report, only shit.

What a waste of a massive long screen that cost loads of money. You could do something great with that. Seriously.

It’s not that I don’t like the Ford advert, it’s fine. But in my humble opinion it’s wasn’t ready to be hero-ised.

Here’s hoping the Bravia ad deserves the expectation that’s being built up around it…

ahh..this explains a twitter i got yesterday ‘Playing with large playdoh bunnies in downtown NY’, from my friend James i’ll have you know..not through the sonybravia twitter feed (crikey, what’s going on?)

Coincidentally, when I first saw the Ford ad, the balloons immediately made me think of Sony and colour rather than the car.

And yesterday when I asked a friend if she’d see the prpearation for the rabbit ad because it’s in her neighbourhood, she responded that in her expereince there were more sheep than rabbits on the streets of Manhattan.

It’s a twisted web we weave. Yes Dan, it was me. Although I had no idea a bravia twitter was being done. To be honest I thought that might have been written by Kate @ Naked!

Anyway enough of such trivialities, Iain, I don’t think you are going to be disappointed by this particular piece of TV. It might be the end of TV but it’s going to go out with a bang, well, a sort of playdoh sounding giant squelch.

I write an un-official blog about Sony and know people who know people involved the photo shoot. There is quite a lot of internal buzz around this, but still everything is under wraps. If anyone is in New York and can get some film on this it would be great. Fallen is doing the ad, but I don’t know who is doing the PR.

It's a twisted web we weave. Yes Dan, it was me. Although I had no idea a bravia twitter was being done. To be honest I thought that might have been written by Kate @ Naked!

Anyway enough of such trivialities, Iain, I don't think you are going to be disappointed by this particular piece of TV. It might be the end of TV but it's going to go out with a bang, well, a sort of playdoh sounding giant squelch.